Education: March 2018 Archives
Return of the MOOCs | City Journal
How one entrepreneur is trying to turn massive open online courses (MOOCs) into a low-cost on-ramp for higher education:
"For the millions of students taking free courses online, the road to college credits was unlikely to run through Washington. Klinsky soon shifted his efforts toward helping these students gain credit through existing channels. 'The lightbulb went on,' he remembers, when he noticed that 'there are already ways to get credit through the College Board exam process.' Thus arrived the Freshman Year for Free program. The Modern States website would offer video courses structured to match the content and skill level of these credit-granting exams.
"The most widely taken College Board exams are the Advanced Placement tests, offered to high school students annually. For online-course students, however, the lesser-known College Level Examination Program tests are much more accessible--available on demand at more than 1,800 examination centers. Klinsky and his partners began developing courses tailored to both AP and CLEP. He personally endowed a fund for the Freshman Year for Free program that would reimburse the $85 exam fees of the first 10,000 test-takers, making the path to credit free from start to finish. The College Board exams cover a full range of introductory-level topics; some persevering Modern States users will be able to complete an entire first year of college."
Donald Kagan writes: "No fair-minded person can deny that, whatever its other characteristics, the West has created institutions of government and law that provide unprecedented freedom for its people and a body of natural scientific knowledge and technological achievement that together make possible a level of health and material prosperity undreamed of in earlier times and unknown outside the West and the areas it has influenced. I think V. S. Naipaul, born in Trinidad of Indian parents, is right to speak of the modern world as "our universal civilization" shaped chiefly by the West. Most people around the world who know of them want to benefit from the achievements of Western science and technology. Increasingly, they also want to participate in its political freedom. The evidence suggests, moreover, that a society cannot achieve the full benefits of Western science and technology without a commitment to reason and objectivity as essential to knowledge and to the political freedom that sustains it and helps it move forward. The primacy of reason and the pursuit of objectivity, therefore, both characteristic of the Western experience, seem to be essential for the achievement of the desired goals anywhere in the world.
"The civilization of the West, however, was not the result of some inevitable process through which other cultures will automatically pass. It emerged from a unique history in which chance and accident often played a vital part. The institutions and ideas, therefore, that provide for freedom and improvement in the material conditions of life can not take root and flourish without an understanding of how they came about and what challenges they have had to surmount. Non-Western people who wish to share in the things that characterize modernity will need to study the ideas and history of Western civilization to achieve what they want, and Westerners who wish to preserve them must do the same."
Left-wing magazine on the success of PragerU: "Canned testimonials aside, I don't doubt PragerU's videos are changing minds. Most of us are fairly ignorant about most things, so what happens when our outlook on a subject is based largely on one slick, accessible video? Knowing little about Native American politics, I found Naomi Schaefer Riley's argument--that American Indian poverty is largely the fault of well-meaning government overreach--pretty persuasive. I'm sure there's another side, but what if fact-checking her thesis isn't high on my priority list?
"The formula is simple enough--a broad range of presenters and topics, a consistent supply of new product, aggressive promotion--but Estrin thinks the real key is brevity. He's seen the liberal academics natter away in lecture-hall videos, taking for granted that busy people will sacrifice an hour to absorb their views on economics or Plato. Even the YouTube videos in the popular Crash Course series are 10 to 12 minutes--too long. 'In the world of the internet, five minutes is the right dosage,' Estrin says. 'You can't get calculus across, but you can get a lot in politics, history, a lot of things.'"
Jordan Peterson: 'The pursuit of happiness is a pointless goal' | Global | The Guardian
Tim Lott speaks to Jordan Peterson: "'It's all very well to think the meaning of life is happiness, but what happens when you're unhappy? Happiness is a great side effect. When it comes, accept it gratefully. But it's fleeting and unpredictable. It's not something to aim at - because it's not an aim. And if happiness is the purpose of life, what happens when you're unhappy? Then you're a failure. And perhaps a suicidal failure. Happiness is like cotton candy. It's just not going to do the job.'
"But how do we build meaning? By putting it before expediency. Which is quite close to simply 'acting right'. Peterson believes that everyone is born with an instinct for ethics and meaning. It is also a matter of responsibility - you need to have the courage to voluntarily shoulder the great burden of being in order to move towards that meaning. This is what the biblical stories tell us. The great world stories have a moral purpose - they teach us how to pursue meaning over narrow self-interest. Whether it's Pinocchio, The Lion King, Harry Potter or the Bible, they are all saying the same thing - take the highest path, pick up the heaviest rock and you will have the hope of being psychologically reborn despite the inevitable suffering that life brings."
The Psychology of Progressive Hostility - Quillette
Matthew Blackwell writes: "Both Sowell and Pinker contend that conservatives see an unfortunate world of moral trade-offs in which every moral judgment comes with costs that must be properly balanced. Progressives, on the other hand, seem to be blind to, or in denial about, these trade-offs, whether economic and social; theirs is a utopian or unconstrained vision, in which every moral grievance must be immediately extinguished until we have perfected society. This is why conservatives don't tend to express the same emotional hostility as the Left; a deeper grasp of the world's complexity has the effect of encouraging intellectual humility. The conservative hears the progressive's latest demands and says, 'I can see how you might come to that conclusion, but I think you've overlooked the following...' In contrast, the progressive hears the conservative and thinks, 'I have no idea why you would believe that. You're probably a racist.'
"No doubt, other factors creep into the mix of the triggered progressive mind. Fashionable theories, such as those advanced by Jacques Derrida, teach students that all text and language is structured by power, so any argument from someone in a position of 'gendered' or 'racial' power can be disregarded, whatever its logical validity. By reinforcing this premise with a heavily left-biased education, university educators have created a Frankenstein generation of fanatical students, and are now finding that they are unable to force the genie they've conjured back into its bottle."
Donald Trump & Evangelicals -- Response to Michael Gerson's Atlantic Essay | National Review
David French presents a solid critique of Michael Gerson's dismissive criticism of evangelicals, pointing out the genuine threats to religious liberty and American culture from the Left.
The following excerpt refers to the exchange the Obergefell oral arguments between Justice Samuel Alito and the Solicitor General, regarding the implications of same-sex marriage for dissenting Christian universities.
"Culturally, this is the president's lawyer casting traditional Christians outside the boundaries of mainstream American society, placing them in the same category as racists for upholding a biblical definition of marriage. Legally, he's raising the possibility that the schools and institutions educating young Christian kids by the millions could face the choice between compromise and financial crisis.
"And, keep in mind, this statement occurred against a generation-long campaign of elite demonization of Evangelical Christian belief and practice. In my own law practice, I witnessed more than 100 colleges and universities attempt to bar one or more Christian student groups from campus -- mainly on the grounds that it was 'discriminatory' for Christian groups to reserve leadership positions for Christian students. I represented Christian students who were told they had to change their religious beliefs to earn degrees from public universities.
"Moreover, the solicitor general made his statement mere weeks after Christians watched, aghast, as our nation's largest and most powerful corporations gang-tackled the state of Indiana for having the audacity to enact a Religious Freedom Restoration Act that did little more than re-instate traditional legal protections for religious liberty. This corporate gang-tackle featured an absurd media pile-on as reporters on the hunt for anti-gay bigotry fixed their eyes on a previously unknown pizza store simply because it hypothetically wouldn't serve pizza at a gay wedding."
French also objects to Gerson's dismissal of the importance of early 1960s cases driving religion out of schools, Roe v. Wade, and Obergefell: "This is a curiously reductive way of describing a series of legal changes that undermined the traditional constitutional order, cleared the way for the deaths of tens of millions of innocent children, and jeopardized the autonomy and liberty of the institutions Christian parents choose to train and educate their kids."
French didn't address this, but Gerson also pooh-poohed the battle against evolution in the early 20th century, reducing the whole of evolution to the concept of natural selection, and ignoring the evolutionists' assertions that life came about by time and chance (no Creator), that mankind is nothing but big-brained apes (not created in God's image), and that the Bible is an untrustworthy collection of Iron Age myths (not God's Word). The Christian institutions that capitulated to the philosophy of the evolutionists are no longer discernably Christian, and yet Gerson laments evangelicals' refusal to go along.
Camille Paglia & Jordan B Peterson - Modern Times Transcript
A wide-ranging, quotable conversation between two contrarian thinkers. A few highlights:
Peterson: "See that also seems to me to be related to the postmodern emphasis on power because there's something terrible underground going on there. And that is. . . I think this is the sort of thing that was reflected in the Soviet Union, too. Especially in the 20s when there was this idea, a radical idea, that you could remake human beings entirely because they had no essential nature.
"So, if your fundamental hypothesis is that nothing exists except power, and you believe that, then that also gives you the right in some sense to exercise your power at the creation of the kind of humanity that your utopian vision envisions. And that also seems to me to justify the postmodern insistence that everything is only a linguistic construct. It again goes down to the notion of power, which Derrida and Foucault and Lacan are so bloody obsessed with.
"It seems to me what they're trying to do is to take all the potential power for the creation of human beings to themselves without any bounding conditions whatsoever. There's no history, there's no biology, and everything is a fluid culture that can be manipulated at will.
"In Canada there are terrible arguments right now about biological essentialism, let's say. And one of the things that happened, which was something I objected to precisely a year ago, is that the social constructionist view of human identity has been built now into Canadian law. So there's an insistence that biological sex, gender identity, gender expression, and sexual proclivity vary independently with no causal relationship between any of the levels.
"And so that's in the law, and not only is it in the law, it's being taught everywhere. It's being taught in the Armed Forces, it's being taught in the police, it's being taught to the elementary school kids, and the junior high school kids. And underneath it all I see this terrible striving for arbitrary power that's associated with this crazy utopianism."
Paglia: "You had a situation, an environmentally difficult situation like the deserts Mesopotamia, or the peculiar character of Egyptian geography where you can only have a little tiny fertile line along the edges of the Nile. Otherwise, desert landscape. So [understanding] civilization and authority as not necessarily about power grabbing but about organization to achieve something for the good of the people as a whole.... By reducing all hierarchy to power, and selfish power, is utterly naive. It's ignorant.I say education has to be totally reconstituted, including public education, to begin in the most distant past so our young people today, who know nothing about how the world was created that they inhabit, can understand what a marvelous technological paradise they live in. And it's the product of capitalism, it's the product of individual innovation. Most of it's the product of a Western tradition that everyone wants to trash now."
Paglia: "I feel that the cafeteria menu of the university curriculum has to be abandoned. We must return to historical courses that begin in the earliest period, in the Stone Age and antiquity in order to give perspective to our present. . . An analysis to our present culture. I want fifty to seventy-five percent of college administrators fired and the money be transferred over to faculty and to libraries and to instruction. I think that obviously the way people are being trained right now, including at the public school level. . . I think the public school level has gone to hell.... I mean, I've been teaching for 46 years. So I can tell the slow degradation of public school education to the point now that the students have absolutely no sense of world geography, of world history. They know absolutely nothing. . . They don't know anything about wars. And the reality, the barbaric reality of most of human history. . . What a fantastic culture we live in."
Kira Davis at RedState: Dear Conservative Parents: Stop Raising Politicians and Pundits
Kira Davis says our country needs more conservative techies and fewer Tomi Lahrens. She points to the dominance of leftists in the social media industry (and their censorship of conservative ideas, like YouTube's ban of PragerU videos, or Facebook's tagging of obvious satire as "fake news." As a card-carrying techie (MIT graduate, over 30 years as a software engineer), I found this very interesting, and I'm going to mull it over. I think a more important credential than technical skills is risk-taking, entrepreneurial spirit. Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates weren't particularly brilliant engineers, but they saw a market and an opportunity and were able to harness the talents of others to build something that consumers wanted. I'll agree that we don't need more Tomi Lahrens, but we do need more pundits and politicians who are classically educated, are well-grounded in Christian principles, thoughtful, and articulate.
